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What is there to be done? It’s been a total collapse this month. The pitching staff has a 4.71 ERA for August, though to me that really doesn’t explain how bad things have been — the five starters have a collective ERA of 5.79, if I’m reading this correctly, which I think I am. Oh, and don’t forget 34 homers allowed in 25 games, either.

Offensively things have been better, but not much. They’re scoring 4.72 runs per game on .279/.339/.388 hitting, the former which sounds pretty good but the latter which looks pretty bad. They haven’t been walking as much this month, either, with their walk total falling below 10% of their at-bats (yes, that includes Tuesday night’s walk-o-rama against Tampa Bay). Power hitting has dropped off as well — roughly 26% of their hits have gone for extra bases this month, compared to nearly 32% for the first four months of the season.

I dunno. It’s pretty ridiculous at this point to suggest drastic moves like releasing McLemore and Mabry, because we all know those things aren’t going to happen. On the pitching side of things, they appear to be pretty much stuck with what they have. The good news there is that there should be no way all five starters can pitch this poorly for another month, though at the same time I think you could probably make a pretty compelling argument why any one of them easily could.

On the fleeting nature of random stats: while I reported here earlier that Baseball Prospectus’ Postseason Odds Report had the M’s winning a playoff berth what, 80% of the time, they’re now down to a 41% chance at the division title and a 20% chance at the wild card, which means there’s a 40% chance I’ll have paid the M’s a huge ‘handling’ fee for my playoff strip that would have been better spent playing poker, say.

Oakland: 59% division title, 14% wild card berth

Boston: 17% division title, 52% wild card berth

To toss out some more cliches, though — there’s no point in this exercise. The Mariners and Oakland play six games between now and the end of the season, and when these two teams get together you can throw out the projections. The Mariners control their own destiny. And so on and such and such.

Just as a service note, I’m screwing around with possibly adding comments today. I’d add RSS, but it looks like it would require an additional investment of $ by me, and frankly, the in/out money ratio on this blog is currently running… well, I’m getting a “div 0” error. So if you see a comments link, feel free to give them a whirl. And if you don’t, well… you get what you pay for. The cliches are free.

Somebody just posted on our comments section — hey! we’ve got comments! [ed. note: had] — about perhaps putting Soriano in the rotation to shake things up. I like it. I had been reluctant about this before, when things were going well and he was tearing it up in relief, but now it seems like a good idea. I don’t know how long you can keep running out the same five starters when none of them have been effective for basically the last month. I wouldn’t be averse to trying Mateo, either.

Now the question becomes: Who do you yank from the rotation? My nominations would be Meche and/or Franklin.